In the fourth part of Albert Camus’ humane and heartfelt masterpiece, The Plague, taking place in the French port of Oran on the Algerian coast, there is a moment of quiet surprise following a scene where an innocent child lets out a final, death-rattling wail as he expires in a hospital ward, tortured to the end by the deadly bacillus that is overtaking the town like a wildfire tearing into the heart of a forest. Wringing his hands and importuning God to the save the child, a lowly but faithful man of the cloth, the priest stands beside the cot helpless and abject as the doctor, Rieux, later discovered to…
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For a philosopher with a reputation that tends to be pooh-poohed as excessively gloomy and pessimistic, Schopenhauer and his posthumous popularity find no respite in one incident that occurred in the year 1821, when he was staying in his lodgings in Berlin. A young and brilliant man then in his thirties, with a spitfire’s outlook and the temperament of a boiling kettle, he ran up against something that he had long since started disdaining: the lives and habits of frivolous normal people. Throw in a nervous disposition and the needs for the silence and solitude demanded by the nature of his work, and you have a potent cocktail of confrontation.…
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In the antepenultimate stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, published with an anthology of his work in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes that “Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” commemorating the humanity of its author as much as the honorable sentiments of civility and altruism. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets, contradicting these sentiments with psychopathic charm and hauteur, exhibits a cunning exacting revenge on the hypocrisies of British classism. Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, heir to the dukedom of the majestic Chalfont, is the psychopathic protagonist intent…
